Abstract
The role of business as a forerunner of societal change might be in dispute, but the reality is that the main resource of society is the business enterprise. The observations and reflections presented in this article are especially oriented toward the use of and attitudes toward human resources and the unlimited reserves of human talent. Researchers within the disciplines of psychology and sociology often reveal a gap between different worldviews easily resulting in misunderstandings between their realms of research and application. Do these differing views point to the main reason for a relative inapplicability of research results from behavioral science to the working life? It might be pressure on the researchers in those sciences to be “scientific” in a way that better suits the natural sciences, although those traditional scientific ideas are also coming into question. In business, it is often necessary to adopt methods based on the fact that they feel reasonable. Such methods often prove effective later but may not be objectively proven in a way that meets scientific standards. Business functions in both modes, using “trial and error” as a source of knowledge as well as stringency and objective measures, reflecting the virtues of established science. If we look more closely at these phenomena, we find the same kind of conflict among people advocating, respectively, objective and nonobjective approaches to their discipline, whether in science or in business. Such conflicts consume energy, which would be better used in the understanding and integration of different “strategies of knowing” or, which is a point here, “ways of being.” A number of questions that have emerged when models and theories have met with “real life” are proposed. It is assumed that consideration of these questions supports a transformation of psychological and sociological disciplines in their relationship with the emerging transformation of business.
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